The Academy Awards for films have raised mixed feelings among show-business people from their beginnings. Each year, a sizeable repertoire of cynical anecdotes is rehearsed in print and broadcast commentary, as if to proclaim that the professionals, especially the journalists, do not take the clamorous ritual of self-worship seriously. Stories are told and retold about winners using the Oscars - as the little statues symbolizing the Awards are commonly known - as door-stops (writer Ben Hecht is supposed to have been the first to do so), or paperweights - or as even less prestigious utensils: for cracking nuts, say, or straightening bent fenders.
Lost Enthusiasm
Such stories have not lost credibility following recent displays of minimal enthusiasm by recent big winners - which have not helped movie-business efforts to hold up the Awards, to itself and to the public, as the best and biggest trade show of them all. In fact, George C. Scott's refusal to accept a "Best Actor" Oscar for his 1970 role in Patton came across as a gesture of contempt, for all the publicity given to his expressed dissatisfactions with the production. And Marlon Brando's dispatch of a genuine American Indian princess to turn down his 1972 Award for the title performance as The Godfather was clearer as an actor's disrespect for the panoply of his profession that as a protest against continuing injustices to the first minority of the Americas.
But it was left for that professional non-hero, Woody Allen, who was voted no less than three Oscars for his 1977 film, Annie Hall, to make the grandest anti-gesture so far, disdaining the 1978 ceremonies in favor of his long-time hobby, playing jazz clarinet at an East-side New York pub. These incidents only point up what are perennial doubts among professional concerning the leading public event conducted by the most publicity-dependent industry in the world.
One curiously recurrent expression of lack of faith in the Awards is the canard that neither Charles Chaplin nor Greta Garbo ever received one. This is a favorite of disappointed actors and actresses, and their embittered admirers, is found in numerous books on Hollywood, and is fervently repeated by columnists and feature writers. But it doesn't happen to be true. At least, the claim needs to be qualified to put it that neither Chaplain nor Garbo won their Oscars in "regular competition," but as "Special" or "Honorary" Awards: Chaplin's in 1928 for his all-round creative achievement in The Circus - and again in 1972, returned briefly from exile, in a belated tribute to his entire career; and Garbo's in 1954, for all the performances that made her one of the truly proverbial personalities of the cinema.
The persistence of the story itself is an indicator of attitudes about the Awards, in the way that the most elevated distinctions granted by men to one another may fairly and enjoyably be measured by the reverse recognition of those who were not honored. A cold look at the Nobel Prizes - especially those for literature, to take the most magisterial example, may properly turn warmer in amazement over the lists of those who won and those who didn't; the latter including, among others, Mark Twain, Unamuno, Valery, Ortega y Gasset, Maritain, Groce, Santayana, and James Joyce. In the case of the Academy Awards, in particular those for acting, it could be argued that any special recognition out of competition at lest flies beyond range of the open
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